NASA tests concept for off-world fabrication of replacement hardware

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NASA has carried out parabolic flights that mimic microgravity to test "additive manufacturing" — a process that allows for on-call fabrication of spare parts. Work is under way to pursue hardware and procedural changes to make equipment more robust and astronaut-friendly.

Maybe it's time to shelve the old saying, "you can't leave home without it," when it comes to packing for trips to space.

Say you're hunkered down inside Mars Base-1 and a vital piece of life-support gear breaks down. A hurried search in supply bins proves futile. The next cycler spaceship with equipment is months away. Time is running out.

This disaster scenario could be short-circuited by what's tagged as "additive manufacturing" — a process to fabricate or 3-D print a critical widget layer by layer. Using additive manufacturing equipment, items can be cranked out on the spot, whether they're made of hard plastics or certain metals.

Cutting the umbilical
In a televised call to the space station in February, NASA chief Charles Bolden asked two onboard residents at the time, U.S. astronauts Dan Burbank and Don Pettit, to discuss what astronauts need 20 to 30 years from now, based on what they have seen and experienced in their space travels.

"Onboard space station right now, astronauts have to be essentially jacks of all trade," Burbank said. "We need to be able to fix anything and everything that happens."

As people depart from low Earth orbit, Burbank said that one of the key things needed is to essentially cut the umbilical from Earth and be able to maintain spacecraft to the degree "that if something breaks, you can replace a part outright … you need to be able to fabricate a part."

Crews can't bring along all the pieces and parts that may or may not suffer a breakdown over the course of a long mission, Burbank added.

Field center activity
NASA has a team of researchers from four different space agency centers working on demonstrating the full concept, said Karen Taminger, materials research engineer at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

Taminger told Space.com that the research is geared toward identifying a mechanical component needing to be repaired or replaced, designing the replacement part, fabricating it — with additive manufacturing — finishing and inspecting it, and working to demonstrate remote control of the additive manufacturing process.

Currently, all of this work is being done in labs on the ground, at NASA's Langley, Glenn, Marshall and Johnson space centers, Taminger said, "but we are working towards demonstrating this capability on ISS."

Growing support
A demonstration of NASA's concept of an additive manufacturing process, Electron Beam Freeform Fabrication, or EBF3, was done in simulated microgravity on parabolic aircraft flights back in 2007.

"We're now pursuing hardware and procedural changes to make the system more robust and astronaut-friendly," Taminger said.

Science editor Alan Boyle's blog: "Astronaut Abby" is at the controls of a social-media machine that is launching the 15-year-old from Minnesota to Kazakhstan this month for the liftoff of the International Space Station's next crew.

Similarly, an enterprising team from Singularity University, a non-profit institution in California's Silicon Valley that works on forward-thinking technologies, has formed a "Made in Space" company, carrying out parabolic flights last year to showcase their 3D printing initiative.

With the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation, there has been increased national focus on 3D printing and additive manufacturing in the past six months, Taminger said. "In addition to helping create manufacturing jobs in the United States, we are pushing to demonstrate this on the ISS, in preparation for longer-duration space exploration."

Although these experiments have yet to be funded or scheduled to go to the ISS, "that is certainly where we would like to go," Taminger added.

On-demand demo
Space-based, on-demand fabrication of metallic parts using additive manufacturing was outlined last month during the 1st Annual International Space Station Research & Development Conference, held in Denver.

The space station is an "ideal platform" for testing the value of on-demand additive manufacturing in the space environment, said some experts present.

According to a research paper on the initiative, the EBF3 process NASA is exploring uses an electron beam and wire to fabricate metallic structures. The process efficiencies of the electron beam and the solid wire feedstock make the EBF3 process attractive for use in space, say researchers engaged in studying the manufacturing idea.

Reducing inventory
One technology highlighted by NASA is solid freeform fabrication, a process that could be used to support fabrication and repair of large space structures, spacecraft primary structure and replacement components.

Production of replacement components by solid freeform fabrication processes during a mission could reduce or eliminate the need to carry a complete inventory of premanufactured spares. Rather, replacement components would be generated as needed from feedstock material.

As a result, only the total mass of replacements would need to be estimated instead of a prediction of which specific components might be needed. Attempting to predict which components will fail and require replacement will inherently be an inaccurate process and is likely to result in stashing away numerous components that will never be used — which is wasted mass — while "under-provisioning" other components, experts said.

"Just as Christopher Columbus brought tools with him to help explore the New World," Taminger concluded,"NASA is developing an on-demand additive manufacturing tool that will allow space explorers to build what they want, when and where they need it."

Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is a winner of last year's National Space Club Press Award and a past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines. He has written for Space.com since 1999.

Southern stargazing

Stars, galaxies and nebulas dot the skies over the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Paranal Observatory in Chile, in a picture released on Jan. 7. This image also shows three of the four movable units that feed light into the Very Large Telescope Interferometer, the world's most advanced optical instrument. Combining to form one larger telescope, they are greater than the sum of their parts: They reveal details that would otherwise be visible only through a telescope as large as the distance between them.
(Y. Beletsky / ESO)
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A balloon's view

Cameras captured the Grandville High School RoboDawgs' balloon floating through Earth's upper atmosphere during its ascent on Dec. 28, 2013. The Grandville RoboDawgs’ first winter balloon launch reached an estimated altitude of 130,000 feet, or about 25 miles, according to coaches Mike Evele and Doug Hepfer. It skyrocketed past the team’s previous 100,000-feet record set in June. The RoboDawgs started with just one robotics team in 1998, but they've grown to support more than 30 teams at public schools in Grandville, Mich.
(Kyle Moroney / AP)
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Spacemen at work

Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kotov, right, and Sergey Ryazanskiy perform maintenance on the International Space Station on Jan. 27. During the six-hour, eight-minute spacewalk, Kotov and Ryazanskiy completed the installation of a pair of high-fidelity cameras that experienced connectivity issues during a Dec. 27 spacewalk. The cosmonauts also retrieved scientific gear outside the station's Russian segment.
(NASA)
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Special delivery

The International Space Station's Canadian-built robotic arm moves toward Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Cygnus autonomous cargo craft as it approaches the station for a Jan. 12 delivery. The mountains below are the southwestern Alps.
(NASA)
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Accidental art

A piece of art? A time-lapse photo? A flickering light show? At first glance, this image looks nothing like the images we're used to seeing from the Hubble Space Telescope. But it's a genuine Hubble frame that was released on Jan. 27. Hubble's team suspects that the telescope's Fine Guidance System locked onto a bad guide star, potentially a double star or binary. This caused an error in the tracking system, resulting in a remarkable picture of brightly colored stellar streaks. The prominent red streaks are from stars in the globular cluster NGC 288.
(NASA / ESA)
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Supersonic test flight

A camera looking back over Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo's fuselage shows the rocket burn with a Mojave Desert vista in the background during a test flight of the rocket plane on Jan. 10. Cameras were mounted on the exterior of SpaceShipTwo as well as its carrier airplane, WhiteKnightTwo, to monitor the rocket engine's performance. The test was aimed at setting the stage for honest-to-goodness flights into outer space later this year, and eventual commercial space tours.

Red lagoon

The VLT Survey Telescope at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile captured this richly detailed new image of the Lagoon Nebula, released on Jan. 22. This giant cloud of gas and dust is creating intensely bright young stars, and is home to young stellar clusters. This image is a tiny part of just one of 11 public surveys of the sky now in progress using ESO telescopes.
(ESO/VPHAS team)
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Fire on the mountain

This image provided by NASA shows a satellite view of smoke from the Colby Fire, taken by the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer aboard NASA's Terra spacecraft as it passed over Southern California on Jan. 16. The fire burned more than 1,863 acres and forced the evacuation of 3,700 people.
(NASA via AP)
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Where stars are born

An image captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Orion Nebula, an immense stellar nursery some 1,500 light-years away. This false-color infrared view, released on Jan. 15, spans about 40 light-years across the region. The brightest portion of the nebula is centered on Orion's young, massive, hot stars, known as the Trapezium Cluster. But Spitzer also can detect stars still in the process of formation, seen here in red hues.
(NASA / JPL-Caltech)
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A long, long time ago...

This long-exposure picture from the Hubble Space Telescope, released Jan. 8, is the deepest image ever made of any cluster of galaxies. The cluster known as Abell 2744 appears in the foreground. It contains several hundred galaxies as they looked 3.5 billion years ago. Abell 2744 acts as a gravitational lens to warp space, brightening and magnifying images of nearly 3,000 distant background galaxies. The more distant galaxies appear as they did more than 12 billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang.
(NASA / NASA via AFP - Getty Images)
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Frosty halo

Sun dogs are bright spots that appear in the sky around the sun when light is refracted through ice crystals in the atmosphere. These sun dogs appeared on Jan. 5 amid brutally cold temperatures along Highway 83, north of Bismarck, N.D. The temperature was about 22 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, with a 50-below-zero wind chill.